Launch HN: Miyagi (YC W25) turns YouTube videos into online, interactive courses
69 comments
·May 13, 2025clamlady
Can you extend this into language learning content on YT? I think that would also have amazing utility. As a biologist, so happy to see Crime Pays but Botany doesn't on here. Thanks for the awesome tool. I will be using it.
ph4evers
Yes! I did something similar with daily exercises at https://app.fluentsubs.com/exercises/daily
EcommerceFlow
Really cool idea! Some improvements I'd recommend with the ultimate goal being "getting users to learn the subject at hand".
1) Section Lectures on the left side need to be cleaned up, instead of just a numbered list. Seeing 30+ lectures off rip is a bit daunting, especially with no labeling, sectioning, etc. I'd imagine feeding a model a list of all the lecture titles, then having it structured should work?
2) You're doing too much on the bottom section.
You need to incorporate all those tabs into the single Ai tutor, which can run whatever tools required (maybe notes/discussion can be a small additional indication). No one's going to be using the Flashcards section, and it's calling probably the same LLM as the AI tutor, so might as well combine them.
For the quiz, maybe when the video ends or the user wants to continue, the Ai Tutor goes into "quiz mode" forcing the user to attempt or pass the quiz (depending on the settings?).
Think of this like Cursor but for Education. Cursors powerful agent can handle/do so much, you're not using 3-4 different fields.
Oh and have it on the right side instead of transcript, so it's right there in users faces instead of having to scroll down.
eochaid
This is a fun concept, and I love the name!
I’m curious why you didn’t use multiple choice for the exercises? I feel like those would be easier than typing out full answers and be closer to MOOC style homework. Maybe have a longer written question at the end of a section.
The exercises work pretty well, I like the highlighting red wrong vs. green right. It does feel a bit like the MOOC-style discussions. The tutor doesn’t just tell you the answers which is cool, but something about talking with the tutor feels a bit flat. And the flashcards weren’t very helpful for the course I picked.
I could see myself doing some courses like this with some more gamification. Being able to filter by course provider (Ycombinator, or MIT) would be cool too.
bestwillcui
Thanks! We do have multiple choice questions now (agreed) but some of the older courses were generated when there were only short answer.
Anything specific we could improve about talking to the tutor? Definitely will add some of those features and gamify better.
eochaid
Maybe give the tutor some personality or persona (having it speak as the instructor). I’m probably off base with that suggestion, though.
Again, very cool idea. I'm going to try some of the nuclear courses later this week.
Best of luck!
jmathai
I think this is a great idea. I’ve learned so much on YouTube but it’s always been in small chunks and very task oriented. I imagine there’s a lot of content Which covers broad topics that I don’t come across.
Something I’ve been doing more and more lately is asking chatgpt to create a detailed description of a topic which can be read aloud for whatever duration I plan on driving. This works exceptionally well - even for short 5 minute drives.
I wonder if the same can be done for video-based content. Sometimes I’m short on time but still want to learn something.
breakpointalpha
Poker, specifically Texas No Limit Hold'em, is widely taught on Youtube.
Here are some of the very best in the category, it would be really cool if you partnered with any of these.
https://www.youtube.com/@hungryhorsepoker
tdthree
Poker is interesting. I think these videos do work in our current course generation process. However, I do think some subjects like poker need custom tooling around the course to really make the learning experience great. For example, access to solvers or actually playing a hand on a table is a part of the course experience as well. Chess is another one that falls in this special bucket imo. Some of this tooling is on the roadmap!
bestwillcui
Thanks, we'll reach out. We have a poker course from MIT (https://miyagilabs.ai/course/mit15s50) but yea these seem more practical & engaging.
lassenordahl
Just wanna say that this is one of those magical ideas that I'd never personally think of, but when I see it like this, it makes perfect sense! So cool.
vm
For anyone else interested in Bloom's 2-sigma, here's the original paper (1984): https://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf
Blows my mind that 1:1 tutoring dwarfs the impact of other factors such as socioeconomic status, reinforcement, assigned homework, classroom morale, etc (at least according to the researchers).
Does anyone know if this thesis has been replicated? Or if these results hold in modern times (original study was 40 years ago)?
WildRyc
The article states that Anaina and Burke separately conducted their tests, but social robots [1] have been shown to be effective in individual tutoring. Human tutoring is not always better than a well-designed computer program [2]. There have been issues with how studies interpret their effect on group size / scalability [3].
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/scirobotics.aat5954 [2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00461520.2011.61... [3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0013189X2091279...
basch
Would be nice ie to see this product with focus on elementary school age content.
kubasienki
Do you have any revenue sharing program with the content creators? Or are you just poaching them?
bestwillcui
Lol yea not just poaching, we do revenue sharing (signed deals with a bunch of top creators). They get the majority of all revenue from courses.
For instance we worked directly with Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't & Faculty of Khan etc. to get official courses that they also had input in, and 3Blue1Brown is on board with us having his content on our site.
andrethegiant
Does it work on YouTube videos that have transcripts disabled?
tdthree
No, it won't work for those.
lmrl
You probably know this, but gemini is great to generate transcripts. I did a quick browser extension for that: https://github.com/za01br/yt-subtitle-extension
Congrats on the launch!
skeeter2020
I work in edtech and one of my teams is content creation, so pretty excited about this space but also very aware of the challenges and massive amounts of hype and over promise / under deliver. To assess I tried to generate a short (< 10m), one-video course from a YT video I've previously watched on a topic I'm an "expert" - after an hour all I see is the embedded video, the transcript and "generating content" dialog.
UPDATE: " This course failed to generate. Please try again or contact us."
I really like a lot of the components of your idea, but the execution is underwhelming. Right now it feels like you're providing middling tools for too many components without nailing any of them. Alternatively I could watch the YT video at all ready has a transcript, take notes in any tool, and ask questions to any LLM; the piece missing is context, so that's where it feels like you should focus.
Re: assessments; it feels like you're being distracted here; I'm not convinced that's how your natural target market learns in this modality. We generate quizes in our product, but it's typically used in the "internal compliance" segment - think mandatory training like food safety for food preparers - not the external (typically adult) self-improvement market (which is huge!). If you're going to do asessments you need a lot of non-AI boilerplate around tracking, validation and certification/credentials. My two cents: quizes in your app are a cool demo feature with little real value.
bestwillcui
Sorry we're running into some rate limits with course generation but will be fixed soon. Valid points—will respond in a bit.
pxndxx
Are the people that create the content okay with this?
tdthree
Yes. Any content that we monetize we are revenue sharing with the creator. We already have more than 5 partnerships with creators.
haswell
Do creators have the option to opt out?
I’m still coming up to speed on the full scope of what your product does, but I’m curious what you’d say to someone like pal2tec, who has some fairly strong and what I feel to be reasonable views about the impact of content summarization [0].
Getting direct buy-in and sharing revenue is great. But it’s not clear to me that this is the only thing that creators care about, i.e. are you still summarizing content you’re not monetizing without creator buy-in?
bestwillcui
Yep, if anyone didn't want their videos to be on our site, we would take it down.
Just watched the video, I don't initially agree with his take completely but do totally respect the viewpoint and think a payment split to the creator whenever someone summarizes the video makes sense.
Yes we do offer the option to summarize content without creator buy-in, although it seems a bit different since we're also augmenting the content with questions etc. which should drive users to watch the video even more as opposed to skip it and just read the summary.
But you're right it's not perfect. If we ever have creators who don't want their stuff on our site we'd totally respect their wishes, but that hasn't been the case right now so this seems like the best thing to do.
solardev
Not to be ironic, but... is there a summary of that video? It's a bit long and he doesn't seem to get to the point for quite a while.
chairhairair
3b1b is a monetized partner?
Association with that brand would be very valuable.
tdthree
Not yet! We don't monetize his content (it's not behind a paywall). But we are talking with him :)
zoklet-enjoyer
Who cares?
haswell
The people who spend hundreds of hours carefully creating content for their viewers care [0].
The referenced video is from a photographer who has some pretty strong and reasonable thoughts on this - specifically the features YouTube itself is experimenting with.
Depending on the nature of the AI product, it has the potential to completely sideline creators.
Not saying that’s what Miyagi is doing and it sounds like they’re actually working with creators on this which is good. But the broader point is that such tools need to be thoughtfully implemented.
zoklet-enjoyer
They put their videos out for public consumption. Not behind a paywall. Once its out there, they lose control of how people interact with it. Should cliff notes and other study guides be banned or regulated?
Applejinx
Marketers, among others
sam1234apter
Congrats on launch
Hey HN, we’re Tyrone and Guang, founders of Miyagi Labs (https://miyagilabs.ai), an AI-powered education platform that transforms educational YouTube videos into interactive courses. It helps you learn better through active practice and personalized feedback.
We use LLMs to automatically generate quizzes, practice questions, and real-time feedback from any educational video or resource—turning passive watching into active learning. Here’s a short demo: https://youtu.be/alO7FaorHOY.
Improving education has always been tricky. Bloom’s 2-sigma problem (showing that a high-quality personal tutor is far more effective than conventional methods) has persisted, even as technology has advanced.
We met at MIT as CS majors and have always been passionate about education. Over the years, we’ve become teachers and experts in subjects like chess, algorithms, math, languages, and ninja warrior. A common theme was that we both heavily relied on YouTube to learn.
YouTube has incredible content for learning pretty much anything, but it’s buried in a lot of distractions. Also, passively watching videos is far less effective than taking notes, asking questions, and doing practice problems, which is what we aim to do with Miyagi Labs.
Our solution is essentially a multi-step function that takes in a YouTube playlist (or list of any resources) and outputs an entire course with summaries, questions, answers, and more. The pipeline is roughly: video/resource —> transcript/text —> chunks —> summary and question —> answers to questions, with some other features along the way.
We mostly use prompting and different models at each step to make the course as useful as possible. Certain topics require more practice problems vs. comprehension, and we’d use reasoning models for highly technical subjects.
We launched about three months ago and currently have 400+ courses and partnerships with some businesses and awesome creators. Some of our popular courses include 3Blue1Brown’s linear algebra course, a botany course on plants and ecology, and YC’s How to Start a Startup series.
Our product resembles classical MOOC-style course platforms in terms of UI, but is more interactive. It’s really easy to ask a question or receive custom feedback compared to a static course on Coursera. It’s also comparable to AI tutor sites, but we try to build more of a community and require less activation energy as a learner. We’re basically betting that AI can hugely improve education, but that students still want to learn from their favorite creators and want baseline shared resources for standard topics that are then augmented with personalized features.
You can try it here: https://miyagilabs.ai (no login required for most courses—but if you sign up you can also create your own course).
We’d love your feedback on what kinds of videos/resources you’d like to learn from, what’s missing from current learning tools, and if you know any creators or educators who would like to collaborate. Happy to hear any feedback and answer any questions!